The Pie of the Beholder

Good for William Kristol. The editor of The Weekly Standard was speaking at Earlham College when a student walked on stage and pelted him in the face with an ice cream pie. According to the press reports, Kristol wiped his face, walked back to the microphone and said "Just let me finish this point" to a round of applause. And good for the members of the audience that jeered the pie thrower, a fellow student at the Quaker college, and good for one of the questioners who, though he didn’t agree with Kristol’s neocon views, apologized for his fellow student’s thuggish behavior.

I guess we should be surprised but this episode proves something I’ve felt for a while: the left hates debate. Like extreme members of the right, the anti-Bush left hates opposing views and feels so threatened that they often adopt the tactics of the enemy they despise. Maybe it’s the campus echo chamber where liberal views are the norm and any hint of an opposing idea is poison. It has to be especially confusing and infuriating when the Bush Doctrine -- democracy good, dictators bad -- is working and gaining traction on the Middle East.

When the topic turns to Bush, their minds and judgment shuts down. For a smart bunch of folks, they are quick to equate a pre-emptive war against a brutal dictator with the fascists who shoveled six million Jews, gays, gypsies and physical and mental defectives into the ovens in the 1940s. Nazi is the new “N” word. The 26 million Iraqis who can now choose their own government? It doesn’t hold a match to the dozens of prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib. Libya, Syria and Egypt promising to get their houses in order and adopt more democratic measure? It doesn’t mean a thing unless Germany and France are on board.

Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the left is reduced to watching history happen without them. No wonder they’re frustrated.